


Rite/Wrong

by MotherInLore



Series: Slayers West [5]
Category: Always Coming Home - Ursula K. Le Guin, Slayers (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Crossover, Culture Shock, Humor, Silly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 13:48:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7224865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The gang didn't <em> mean </em> to crash an initiation ritual!  Warnings for really cheap jokes and gratuitous funny hats.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rite/Wrong

Fefinum was the first one to decide they were in trouble. The mule had been inclined to sidle and shy all morning, and, contrary to her usual plod, kept tripping on the backs of everyone's bootheels until they gave up and let her and Wehisho take the lead along the trail. Then Zelgadis heard the howls, too. “Wolf pack,” he announced, stopping dead and checking his sword, “Sounds like a pretty big one, about two or three miles out and headed this way, fast.” Gourry, Lina, and Amelia were settling into attack formation as he spoke. Wehisho pulled on a couple of knots and dropped Fefinum's packs to the ground. 

“She's going to bolt soon,” Wehisho worried aloud, “and the wolves would rather follow her than us if we don't stay between them. And if she gets away I don't now how I'll find her again.”

Getting the unarmed, non-mage out of the field was sound tactics, Zelgadis decided. “Just go, both of you. Stay on the trail if you can.” He didn't turn his face from the direction the pack was coming from, but he heard a thump and slap as Wehisho mounted her nag, and then Fefinum's retreating hoofbeats. “Amelia, Levitate on up and keep an eye on everything- use Ray Wing to follow Wehisho if the wolves go that way and let us know.”

“Right!” 

“No fire if you can help it,” he reminded Lina. They'd had a few near misses out in the scrublands already; the chaparral was oily and burned hot, and they didn't need a wildfire on top of everything else.

“Yeah, yeah. Who put you in charge?” But Lina could put her ego aside (briefly) if someone else's plan made sense, and right now the important thing was preparing to fight. The howls and barks grew louder and closer, and in seconds the first of the creatures were pounding out of the scrub and leaping to the attack.

They weren't actually wolves, Zelgadis realized, after he'd caught one of them in the jaw with his sword and kicked another of them off his leg. They were feral dogs, ranging in size from hound to mastiff, and in fur from greyhound-sleek to poodle-shaggy. Not that any of these dusty, burr-riddled creatures were recognizable as any particular breed. But however motley their appearance, the pack was as well-coordinated as any true wolf pack, and still more aggressive. Even the one that tried to bite Zel's arm and fell off with a yelp and a crunch of broken teeth circled back around to attack again.

“Burst Rondo!” Lina leaped into the middle of the swarm, spraying power in all directions and making very few hits. Gourry was actually doing better; he could force that broadsword of his through two dogs at a time, and his reflexes meant he could change directions when the dogs did. Zel brought his fist down on the skull of the crazy one with the broken teeth, and this time it stayed down. He ran his sword into it, to make sure, and then kicked another one in the ribs as it jumped at him. He heard the crunch of broken bones over the pounding of his own blood. He spun, looking for his next target.

There weren't any. The fight had ended as quickly as it began. He could even still hear Fefinum's retreating hoofbeats, he thought. A few minutes' work had transformed a tsunami of barks, fur, and snapping teeth into... Zelgadis counted... sixteen scrawny, bedraggled corpses. He dropped to a squat and started cleaning his sword.

“That was kinda fun!” Lina had pulled her own sword out sometime during the fray. “No evil sorcerers, no traps, no speeches from Amelia, just a straight-up fight.” She wiped her forehead dramatically. “Xellos didn't even show up!”

Zelgadis wouldn't put it past the mazoku to summon up a pack like this, for labyrinthine reasons of his own, but it was true that Xellos hadn't made his presence known for a day or two. _I hope it stays that way. Also, I hope those 'few unimportant matters' he said he had to take care of really_ were _unimportant._

“Poor pups,” Gourry sighed. “That one over there looks just like the one I had when I was little.”

“You had a dog, Gourry-san?” Amelia waved at them from the footpath, then stopped and looked around. “I see Justice prevailed... oh, dear. Gourry-san, come here, I can heal that for you.”

Whatever was wrong with Gourry wasn't obvious to Zel, and Amelia didn't seem that concerned either. She kept talking to the others as she started her spell. “Wehisho-san and Fefinum are about a mile up the trail. They're just going to wait there for us because Wehisho-san thought Fefinum would get upset again if she smelled all the blood.”

“Good thinking.” Lina surveyed the furry heaps, and her eyes took on a speculative gleam. “Hey... didn't Wehisho tell us before that packs of wild dogs were a danger everywhere around here? Do you think if we showed the local people we got rid of this one they might reward us? Maybe we should cut off the tails and take them with us.”

“Lina-san, that's really icky!”

“Cut off their tails?” Gourry quavered, “ But that one looks just like Doggie!”

“Your pet dog when you were a kid was named 'Doggie?' Figures.” Lina shook her head, dismissively. “Or maybe we should just show the locals this place. I wonder how near the closest village is. Oooh, I hope they reward us! With a big meal with maybe some barbecued pork, or...”

“Somebody's coming.” Zelgadis interrupted her. Several somebodies, riding horses, from the same direction as the dogs had come. As they got closer, they proved to be five boys, somewhere in their rawboned teens. All five were dressed in leather trousers and jackets. That kind of gear had to be sweltering in this weather, which was probably why they were bare-chested under the jackets. They carried long knives, with bows, and quivers hanging from their backs, and they stared down at the scene with expressions that ran the loutish gamut from stupified amazement to thick belligerence.

Lina waved at them, suddenly enough that one of the horses snorted and stepped back a pace. “Hi, guys,” she crowed, “I'm Lina Inverse, the beautiful sorcery genius who defeated these slavering beasts!”

Zel rolled his eyes. “You had help, you know,” he muttered, but he preferred not to draw too much attention to himself, and now wasn't the time to try and step on Lina's ego, anyway.

The boys continued to stare, foreheads wrinkled. Gradually, they turned to one particular one – not the one Zel would have pegged as the leader. But that one said something in a language that seemed to have a lot of D's and G's in it, and then they all swung down from their horses. 

“Do any of you speak Tok?” Zelgadis asked. He hoped so; he didn't want to have to completely rework the translation spell. 

The same one nodded, cautiously. “You kill dogs?” At Lina's answering nod, the boys burst out in a cacophony of overlapping words, with the translator muscling through on sheer lung power. “You kill our dogs!”

“Oh, no!” Amelia gasped. “Oh, I'm so sorry!”

“These were your dogs?” If so, Zel didn't think much of their standards of animal care. “We thought they were wild. They attacked us.”

“Yeah!” Lina strode forward and pushed her face up near the translator's. “Whaddaya think you were doing, setting a bunch of dogs on a poor, helpless girl?”

The translator took a step back, grimacing, and tried again, face corrugated with effort. “Yes. Wild dogs. Our dogs for kill. You take our kill!”

“So... you were hunting these dogs.” That made a little more sense.

Five emphatic nods from the louts. “Yes. Kill dogs, take skins. For honor. Is need kill wild dog for be man.”

Lina shrugged. “You want the skins? Take 'em. There's plenty.” 

The suggestion sparked another confabulation amongst the hunters. This one grew heated, with much waving of hands. The horses edged away, both from the noise and from the dead dogs. Meanwhile, Zel tapped Amelia on the shoulder. “If you've got another Ray Wing in you, I think you'd better get Wehisho,” he murmurred. “Let's hope she speaks … whatever other language it is these guys are using.” Amelia nodded and hurried away, prudently waiting to work the spell until she was a little distance away. The boy Zel thought was the leader of the group aimed a clout at the translator, and he eventually turned to face Lina and the rest again.

“No can take now,” he told them. “You kill. We must to kill dog. We not buzzard, for to take old-kill skin.”

Lina stomped a petulant foot. “ _Nnnrgh!_ You came for the dogskins, they're right there, and you won't take 'em. So whadda ya want?”

“ 'For be man,' they said,” Zelgadis reminded her. He asked the translator, “Do you mean, you are hunting dogs as part of an initiation? That, among your people, a boy must hunt and kill a wild dog before he is accepted as an adult?”

After a brief interval for translation, all the louts' expressions relaxed. “Yes!” From their point of view, the idiot foreigners finally understood the depths of their transgression.

“Well, look!” Lina had stopped shouting, at least. “Those dogs would have killed us if we hadn't fought them. It's not like we could have waited for you. So whaddaya wanna do now?”

On the evidence, they wanted to sulk, and/or go back in time, and Zelgadis was wondering if it might be simpler to just make an exit, leaving the dogs and Lina's imagined reward behind, when another set of hoofbeats announced the return of Wehisho and Amelia, both astride Fefinum. Amelia looked tired. She probably wouldn't be good for much until she recovered from all that time doing Ray Wing; it was a very draining spell. But Wehisho's tact would be a bigger help than Amelia's magic at this point anyway. They both slid down some distance before the battleground, so that the mule could choose her own distance from the dogs, and Wehisho held up a hand but did not wave. “So you are here, people of the Ailkrye,” She called, and as she stepped closer, and introduced herself. “I am Wehisho Sudrevidovmav, or that would be Swallow of Serpentine House, in Tok. My home is the Na Valley, on the other side of the Inland Sea, and my friends and I are on our way to Choum-Rekwit. These are Lina, Gourry, Amelia, and Zelgadis, of no house, traveling from far to the east, and the mule is Fefinum. What are your names?” Meanwhile, Fefinum circled 'round to make her own cautious acquaintance with the horses: grazing some hundred yards from them, looking up every few bites and gradually edging closer.

Once the translator picked out whatever words he knew from Wehisho's greeting, he and the rest of the louts recovered their manners enough to offer their own names in return. The translator was Ho-Dabne Chukbad, the leader was Ho-Choufe Tatsmo, and Zelgadis didn't quite catch the others. Once they were on this mannerly footing, Chukbad repeated, although with much less heat, that “You people take our kill.”

Zelgadis elaborated. “It seems we accidentally usurped an adulthood rite. These...” he considered the implications of using 'men,' or 'boys' and decided that either one would be incitement to more strife, “these guys were hunting the dog pack that attacked us and feel they have been cheated of a victory.”

Wehisho listened with her usual keen attention, but the stiffness of her face suggested that she was biting her tongue. Having spent the last several days listening to her argue about the rightful place of warriors in society (as far away as possible until they came back to their senses, in her opinion), Zel could just imagine what Wehisho thought of a culture where you had to kill something to become an adult. He could almost hear her thinking her favorite epithet, “twisted-neck.”

Fortunately, Gourry chose that moment to catch up mentally with the rest of them and stick his oar in. “Hey, maybe they could fight us? To win the dog skins?” He looked at everyone's reactions and clarified hastily, “not to the death, of course, just, like, wrestling or something.” 

This idea seemed to have some traction among the louts. Once Chukbad translated, they discussed it among themselves with increasing eagerness, while Zel, Gourry, and Lina finished tending to their weapons, and Wehisho hoisted Fefinum's discarded packs up on her shoulder with her own and went to greet the horses. Eventually, Chukbad and Tatsmo turned out to face the group again, and they and Gourry began to make tentative agreements about the terms for the match. First came the easy ones: no weapons, no blows to the head or the genitals. Amelia was accepted as a referee, rather to Zel's surprise; he would have thought the louts would be less trusting. But then came the question of who, exactly, was to be involved in the actual fighting, in what order, and the negotiations degenerated.

Neither Lina nor the louts had any interest in touching each other. Zelgadis offered himself, but he did so while breaking a small, flat piece of sandstone in half with his bare hands, and the louts declined. That left Gourry to wrestle all five boys alone, which Chukbad felt was unfair, but Tatsmo did not. Then there was a discussion among the boys about which of them would go first, and who would be stuck with the much more limited glory of wrestling him when he was tired. That was the point where Gourry stepped in it. “You could just all come at me at the same time,” he offered, smiling blithely. “It wouldn't be any trouble; we can just keep going until you feel like you've done enough to earn your victory, and then I'll stop and you can pin me down!” 

In Zel's opinion, they still might have had a chance of getting back on their way at a decent hour had Amelia just allowed the louts to respond naturally to this insult and have it out with Gourry then and there. Instead, she waded into the fray, crying, “No, no! Put your weapons down! We haven't started yet!” When that didn't work, she planted her feet in her favorite Defender of Justice pose and bawled at the top of her lungs, “If you can't behave I'll tell your mothers!” 

This outburst bought her exactly one and a half seconds of dead silence as everyone stared at her, and then Tatsmo planted on hand firmly on her bosom and shoved her backward, out of the way. Amelia stumbled a step or two and then fell, landing on her bottom. Zel counted to three in his head as the poppy-red blush moved up her neck and face. When it reached her hairline, she bounced up again, too angry even to speechify. “That's IT!” She announced, pelting back toward the dust cloud that hid Gourry and the louts, “PACIFIST CRUSH!!”

Zelgadis blew his breath out in a sigh and stepped out of the way of the fight. He felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to Lina. “Popcorn?” she offered.

“Don't mind if I do.” The two of them settled on a pile of luggage and prepared to watch the show.

****

It was a pretty good show, really. The louts were strong, if not as quick to move as Gourry and Amelia, and they worked well together. Gourry took a few good blows from them. Zel spotted more than a few instances where they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by attacking Amelia, but the Ailkrye must have held the common taboo against Hitting a Girl. Just as well Lina didn't decide to join in this time. Just about the time Zel was getting bored, the seven of them separated, panting, and did not re-engage. Amelia offered to heal Gourry again and he declined. “Just bruises,” he said, “I'll work through it.” The louts stepped back carefully before they drew their knives, starting on the smelly work of skinning the dogs. Zel wasn't entirely sure why they bothered to gut them as well; there wasn't any sign that they wanted the meat. Must be some kind of ritual significance. Or maybe they're just making sure the scavengers get to work early and the whole place doesn't reek for weeks. 

“Finally!” Zelgadis stretched. “We really should get moving, guys. Where's Wehisho?” He glanced around, but could see neither Wehisho nor Fefinum. He frowned. The scrub wasn't that tall.

The louts, too, were looking around the field, first in confusion and then in growing panic. “Where are the horses?”

Zel blinked. It was true; the five horses, like Fefinum, were nowhere to be seen. 

Tatsmo shouted something in Ailkrye. “The Na Valley woman steal our horses!” Chukbad looked a little doubtful as he said this, as if he didn't quite believe it himself, but clearly Tatsmo and one or two of the others did.

Lina rolled her eyes. “Seriously?”

“How dare you!” Amelia huffed, “Wehisho-san is the soul of Honor and Justice!”

Tatsmo shouted something else, puffing out his chest again. “Then where is she?” Chuckbad translated.

Lina shrugged. “Either she went on up the trail like we were planning, or she went somewhere else. Same with your horses. Why weren't any of you watching them if they tend to wander off?” The boys burst out in another babble of Ailkrye, and Zel and Gourry looked at each other and headed back to the packs. Gourry flopped down on the ground, using his pack as a pillow, and closed his eyes. “Wake me when they're done, OK?”

Zelgadis looked at the sun – at least three hours of full daylight left, he judged, and then he rummaged until he'd found his largest-scale map. “Oi, Guys!” When the argument paused, he laid the map out, and said, “We should get help looking if we can. For both our friend and your horses. Can you show where your home is?”

To his surprise, this did not trigger another argument. Chukbad and one of the ones whose names he didn't catch leaned in, and came to swift agreement. They pointed, then Chukbad sketched another map in the dust for good measure. “Haibob trail,” he labeled one long grass stem. “Us, now,” was a pebble. “Dogs come this way.” Another line, this one a long arc, scratched in the dirt and decorated by two or three more rocks that Chuckbad did not explain. “Home is here.”

“How long to walk it?” Zel demanded.

“Two hour, maybe.”

“More horses there?”

“Yes.”

“Faster than trying to trail Wehisho then. Look. I don't care how good she is with them, stealing that many horses single-handed means either she's traveling very fast, or not moving far at all. And if they were going fast, there'd be a clear trail. Same thing if she and the horses are just lost somewhere, together or separately. Either way, we're better off getting more people looking, who know the region better than we do. Let's get walking.”

“Yeah!” Lina agreed. “Besides, I'm starving!”

“You can share feast,” Chukbad told her. “Was to be big party for hunt at home.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” Lina took off running northeast, slowing down to a trot as the rest of them joined her and the chaparral grew denser, then to a trudge as she remembered she was tired as well as hungry. 

The louts, too, grew silent as they trudged along, save an occasional remark in Ailkrye that seemed to have to do with the best route. Zelgadis found himself considering them one by one. Tatsmo seemed to have some real leadership qualities to balance out his dreadful temper. Chukbad was the smallest, and, except when translating, seemed to be one of the less-considered members of the group. A great tall fellow whose name Zel still hadn't caught had an easygoing air and habitually went first and broke trail when called on. One of the other ones did almost nothing but sigh and roll his eyes, and the last one was even quieter, but more attentive and also more cheerful. Whenever that one did say something, it sounded like a joke but made his companions growl or snap. Without having any articulate reason for worrying, Zel found he didn't trust that one.

They slogged on. A stand of eucalyptus trees loomed over the scrub and Zel realized it had been one of the unlabeled rocks on Chukbad's dust-map. Zelgadis caught the occasional snatch of sound that probably came from the Ailkrye village, but they were still at least half a mile away. And of course, every step took them further away from their long-term goal of Choum-Rekwit... “Lina?”

“Yeah, Zel?”

“Did we defeat a major villain recently and I just missed it?”

“What? Why would you think that?”

“Just that this situation is even stupider than usual.”

“What does that have to do with villains?”

“Never mind.”

At last, they crested another little rise and looked down on the Ailkrye village. It proved to be an open circle of beaten dirt, surrounded by dwellings barely a step up from tents; the walls were hides stretched on lightweight frames. The border was marked by a flimsy-looking palisade of bamboo spikes, with more bamboo marking off pigsties and sheepfolds. The center of the village showed every sign of a festival in progress, with the Ailkrye obviously eagerly awaiting the return of their initiates. The space between two huts was draped with rugs that held dishes full of food, and four men were just now hoisting a pig out of a smoking barbecue pit. Zelgadis considered the likely complications of this particular ceremony. The boys were returning with their dog skins, but also with a bunch of strangers who were looking for yet another one, and without their...

“You made it!” Wehisho came up to greet them all. “I followed the horses this way when they wandered off. I figured they'd know where the nearest water source was, but they headed straight home.”

*****

Half an hour later, all five of them were sitting on cushions on a red carpet, the Ailkrye equivalent to a high table, sipping cold lemonade from clay cups and making the acquaintance of a big, square jawed woman of middle age called Hin-Fogwa Mintak, who explained she was one of two people in the little settlement who spoke Tok well. In front of them, the five louts stood before an impressively grim man, old enough to be Mintak's father. He wore a broad-brimmed, high-crowned hat, woven of dark and light-colored grasses. The front of it was decorated with a blazon of bright feathers and a silver and copper badge. Beads shone from the ends of the hundreds of gray braids that fell to his shoulders. His neck was hung with more glass beads, his shoulders draped with yards of elaborately woven cloth. The man probably couldn't move without clicking, but he wasn't moving at all at the moment. “Ho-Tikmat Gagme is our Great Elder,” Mintak explained, somewhat unnecessarily. “Now the initiates will tell him of their hunt, and he will pass judgment. If he says so, they will receive their hats and their Manhood shawls.” Startled by the mental image of a lot of men wearing lace and fringes, knitting, Zel glanced around and saw that the older men were actually wearing something more like broad, heavy scarves, woven in geometric patterns. A few of them _were_ knitting, however.

Tatsmo seemed to be spokesman for the louts. Ho-Tikmat Gagme listened gravely as he spun his tale out, with elaborate gestures and occasionally acting out a jump or a slash. Chukbad looked more and more uncomfortable as he went on, and Zelgadis surmised that Tatsmo's version of events touched reality only on a few points. The officiant made no interruption, however, until the tale wound to its close. Tatsmo presented the largest of the dog skins with a bow, and one of the women slipped in to take it away before it started stinking up the party. Then the old man lifted his head and turned to face his unexpected guests. His mouth opened only about a fingers' width, but he spoke in Tok. “Will our guests please tell us what they saw of this great hunt?” He then repeated himself in Ailkrye, and watched the initiates start to wilt.

Lina bounced up and Zelgadis reached out and pulled her back by her cape. “Tact,” he muttered at her. “Dramatize later.”

Lina shook his hand away impatiently and shoved forward again. But her summary was concise as it was vivid, and she skipped over the arguing in the middle, which had the effect of making Tatsmo and the rest of them sound marginally less stupid. How much commentary Mintak might be adding as she repeated the story in Ailkrye was anyone's guess, of course, but since it seemed Ho-Tikmat Gagme was the decisionmaker and he spoke Tok, it probably didn't matter. Gagme listened to Lina with the same stony frown as he had listened to Tatsmo. “I have some questions,” he told them. “When my hunters came upon you, did they ask you if you had been injured?”

“Well, no,” Lina told him, “But it was probably pretty obvious that we were OK.”

“Did they apologize for putting you to any trouble?” All five of them shook their heads.

“Did they invite you to join the feasting here?” 

“Sure!” Lina declared.

“After the fight was over, and we realized Wehisho and the horses had disappeared,” Zelgadis put in, ignoring his own advice about tact. 

“Ah.” Gagme winced. “Well, then, I must apologize on behalf of these _boys._ They have great courage, but it is clear that they have forgotten that courage is nothing if they are not also courteous and responsible, and so they lost the honor of the hunt while chasing it, and they must wait another year before they enter the Men's Lodges. Instead, we will honor our guests, who slew the dogs.” 

“Well, thanks!” Lina smiled, if anything, more broadly than before, then stopped and began to wave her hands frantically. “Oh, um, really, that's OK, you don't need to-” But Gagme approached inexorably, bearing another hat. This one had even more feathers and a band spangled with pink sequins.

“Lina-San!” Amelia whispered reprovingly, “It would be very rude to refuse an honor!” She stood up very straight and allowed another one of the solemn men place a second hat, with green feathers and a pattern of broad stripes woven into the brim, on her own head. Zel bowed his own head slightly, the better to not see what kind of monstrosity he'd been stuck with. Gourry got one with an even higher crown than usual; if it had been made of felt instead of straw it would easily have held two gallons of water. “Hey, no fair getting the black one!” Lina announced, and Zelgadis felt a whisk of air as Lina grabbed his hat and plunked it on her own head, leaving him with the pink sequins. “I'll get you for this,” he muttered. “I swear I will.”

Gagme barked a very short phrase in Ailkrye at the would-be initiates and they slunk away. “Go wash,” Mintak translated.

The Ailkrye village still threw a party. They had exotic guests, the pig had been cooking all morning, and the wild-dog herd had been dispatched, after all. They could hardly avoid a party, no matter how awkward it was. The five boys, as directed by Ho-Tikmat Gagme, waited until everyone else had been served (including Lina and Gourry going back for fourths) before bringing their own plates to the feast, with Tatsmo the very last of all. Wehisho watched them thoughtfully, from the red carpet. “How badly disgraced are they?” she asked, “Is it unusual for an initiation hunt to run into trouble?” 

Mintak shook her head, sadly. “The hunt didn't used to be such an important part of the ritual. It's only since the Condor people's wars that that changed. Some of the people who went out into the scrublands to fight decided they liked it out there – on both sides of that war. Since then, we have gangs of people living wild and making trouble for the rest of us, lots of thieving and banditry. So being able to protect the houses and the herds has grown more important, and it's getting harder to keep the Warrior's Sickness out.”

Lina stared at some inner vision from under her brows, smiling her most menacing smile and rubbing her hands. “Did you say.... bandits?”

****

Wehisho the pacifist did not enjoy the next few days at all, no matter how much barbecued pork there was.


End file.
